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Making New Discoveries from Old Apollo Moon Missions by David A. Kelly  

Posted by on July 25, 2023 in Author Posts | 1 Comment

Sometimes there’s more to the story than we realize at first. What if kids could learn about events like the Apollo Moon missions that happened long ago, but then find something new in them?

That idea was the launching point for my latest book, Tee Time on the Moon: How Astronaut Alan Shepard Played Lunar Golf.

I love history and space, so over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the Apollo Moon missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’ve  seen documentaries and movies, like Apollo 13. I’ve even traveled to Apollo Mission Control in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they launched the massive Saturn V rockets that lofted the Apollo spacecraft into the sky.

I thought I knew all details of all the astronaut stories, from Apollo 12 being struck by lightning twice just as it was taking off, to the strange “music” that the crew of Apollo 10 heard as it was orbiting the Moon. And, of course, I had also seen the pictures and read the stories of Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard playing golf on the Moon in 1971.

But apparently, I hadn’t heard the whole story. 

I wrote Tee Time on the Moon because a couple of years ago, I came across a news story about how Andy Saunders, an imaging specialist in England, used new techniques to remaster photographs of NASA’s Apollo missions, including Apollo 14, when astronaut Alan Shepard hit some golf balls on the Moon.

In 1971, Apollo 14 was the third crewed mission to land on the Moon. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell conducted almost two days of explorations on the Moon, including retrieving Big Bertha, a moon rock weighing over 19 pounds. But the mission might be best remembered for something that happened right at the end, after all the critical scientific work had been completed.

Alan Shepard took out a specially modified golf club head, attached it to the metal shaft of one of his lunar surface tools, and dropped two golf balls he had stowed along for the ride onto the lunar soil. He was going to play golf on the Moon!

Shepard shanked his first ball into a nearby crater. And after a couple of one-handed swings in his bulky spacesuit at his second and last ball, he finally sent it sailing. He told the TV audience it went for “miles and mile and miles.”

Which, with the Moon’s low gravity and lack of meaningful atmosphere, a professional golfer on the Moon could possibly do.

But Alan didn’t. Though millions watched his second golf ball sail away, nobody really knew how far Alan’s golf ball traveled.

Until about fifty years later.

By using some of the latest image processing techniques to reexamine and remaster many of the photographs made by the Apollo astronauts, Andy Saunders located the golf balls Alan hit and calculated how far they went.

You’ll have to read Tee Time on the Moon to learn exactly how far it went, but all I can say is it wasn’t “miles and miles and miles.”

After learning more about what Andy was doing with the Apollo images, I thought it would be a great way not only to introduce a new generation of readers to some of the accomplishments of the Apollo missions but also to explore how new technologies and approaches, like Andy’s image processing capabilities, could be used to extract new information from old sources.

I think it’s a great story that connects the past to the present and shows how something new can come from something old and how history can continue to reveal new information. The Apollo missions happened over fifty years ago, yet scientists and historians are still learning new things from them.

In fact, NASA recently released three Moon rocks  that have been sealed away untouched for the past fifty years, when astronauts brought them back from the Moon. NASA scientists hope that by analyzing them using today’s technologies, researchers will make new discoveries about them.

Whether it’s Andy Saunders revealing new facts about the Apollo Moon missions from archival images or scientists analyzing fifty-year-old lunar samples to expand our knowledge of the solar system, there’s a lot still to learn from the past events and artifacts, even ones that happened a half-century ago.

I hope that means that today’s students will be the next ones making new connections and identifying new discoveries from yesterday’s history.

<<< David A. Kelly is a children’s author best known for his book series Ballpark Mysteries and Most Valuable Player. He lives in West Newton, MA. Visit davidakellybooks.com.

>>> Edwin Fotheringham is the award-winning illustrator of many picture-book biographies, including Blue Grass Boy, Eleanor Makes Her Mark, and Dazzlin’ Dolly. He has also produced art for magazines, including The New Yorker and Ladies’ Home Journal. Visit edfotheringham.com.